Münster Semantic Interoperability Lab

We are organizing a workshop at Future Internet Symposium, Berlin, September 20^th, 2010. Up-to-date information is available at http://ifgi.uni-muenster.de/DE2010/.

Motivation and Scope

Virtual globes such as Google Earth have become popular for commercial, social and scientific applications in the past few years. The former US vice president Al Gore coined the term ‘Digital Earth’ to envisage a virtual globe that provides access to spatially referenced information on the Web [1]. Various efforts have been made to support Gore’s vision. Custom online earth applications have been developed by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, NASA, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), the OpenStreetMap Community, and the United Nations. Several International working groups have been established such as the International Society for Digital Earth (ISDE) and the Interagency Digital Earth Working Group (IDEWG). Moreover, different conferences and workshops such as the Digital Earth international symposia have been organized to push and document the development of Digital Earth. Tools to support the realization of the Digital Earth vision have been developed at different levels and at different scales, ranging from geo-browsers over online collaborative mapping tools to Spatial Data Infrastructures. The recently established notion of Linked Geodata underpins this vision by connecting distributed data across the Internet.

Existing solutions such as the ones mentioned above cover several aspects of the Digital Earth initiative. Gore’s speech, however, envisioned a ‘truly global, collaborative linking of systems’ that has not been realized yet [1]. Geographic information plays an important role to ‘geo-enable’ the Internet. In 2008, an international group of environmental and geographic scientific experts coming from academia, industry and government collected ideas for the Next Generation Digital Earth [2]. Recent developments such as Linked Data and the Sensor Web have further extended the notion of Digital Earth, so that an update on the state of the art is required. The fast growth of the geospatial community together with the evolving Web call for a periodical analysis to check which are the novel concepts and what is still missing.

[1] Gore, A., 1999. The Digital Earth: Understanding our planet in the 21st Century. Photogrammetric Engineering and Remote Sensing vol 65 (5), 528. 
[2] Craglia et al., 2008. Next-Generation Digital Earth – A position paper from the Vespucci Initiative for the Advancement of Geographic Information Science. International Journal of Spatial Data Infrastructures Research, Vol. 3, 146 –167.

Target Audience and Anticipated Outcomes

The workshop aims to bring together a wide spectrum of researchers from academia, industry and government working on key elements of Next Generation Digital Earth. It promotes and reinforces the notion of Digital Earth by analyzing best practices on the wide range of related fields. The workshop is expected to achieve the following outcomes:

• Stimulate discussion between participants regarding Digital Earth theory framework and technology.
• Provide an interdisciplinary overview of existing solutions making use of Digital Earth that have been developed for specific problems.

List of Topics

We encourage submissions dealing with the following scientific and technical issues:

• Volunteered geographic information
  • Social Web, integration with professional geographic information, modeling trust and reputation
• Linked geodata (LGD)
  • Production and use of LGD, working examples and applications
• Geospatial Semantic Web
  • Semantic Web technologies for geospatial applications, geospatial ontologies
• Semantic Web Services
  • Service creation, discovery and integration into the Digital Earth
• Semantic Sensor Web
  • Semantic annotations of sensors and data, sensor and observations discovery and retrieval
• Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI)
  • Metadata, SDI Policies
• Future Internet tools and Geospatial Data availability
  • Cloud computing, Micro-SDIs
• Digital Earth Architecture and Standards
  • Role of OGC and ISO standards, standards-based solutions
• Information Visualization
  • User interfaces, geo-browsing, visualization techniques for communicating environmental change
• Problem oriented applications of Digital Earth: environment, health, societal benefit areas, etc.
• Other relevant topics for the Next Generation Digital Earth

Workshop Format and Structure

‘Towards Digital Earth’ will be a full day workshop comprising a keynote talk, paper presentations with panel discussions and a demo session.

Submissions and Proceedings

All submissions should be written in English (maximum 4 pages) and conform to Springer LNCS formatting guidelines as specified here. They will be selected on the basis of blind reviews by at least two members of the Program Committee.

The proceedings will be published online (with ISSN). After the workshop, there will be a special issue in theInternational Journal of Spatial Data Infrastructures Research for extended versions of selected papers.

Information on the submission process will be available soon.

Important Dates

• Deadline for Submission: 2^nd July 2010
• Notification of acceptance: 23^rd July 2010
• Camera ready submission of paper: 20^th August 2010

Organizers

The workshop organizers are PhD students at Institute for Geoinformatics, University of Münster, where they are part of the Münster Semantic Interoperability Lab (MUSIL).

• Anusuriya Devaraju (anusuriya.devaraju@uni-muenster.de)
• Alejandro Llaves (alejandro.llaves@uni-muenster.de)
• Patrick Maué (patrick.maue@uni-muenster.de)
• Carsten Keßler (carsten.kessler@uni-muenster.de)

Program Committee

More information coming soon!